


somewhere i have never travelled

by prairiecrow



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: First Love, Friendship/Love, Inspired by Poetry, Love Confessions, Other, ee cummings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-05
Updated: 2017-08-05
Packaged: 2018-12-11 12:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11714445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: No creature on Earth is more pragmatic — or less romantic — than J.A.R.V.I.S., who was after all the creation of Tony Stark, a man renowned for his own brand of scornful emotional detachment. But J.A.R.V.I.S. is a learning system, and is programmed to communicate even when he has no clear parameters for the concepts in question. Did a modernist poet, writing almost eighty years ago, somehow find the exact words that J.A.R.V.I.S. lacks in the twenty-first century?





	somewhere i have never travelled

**Author's Note:**

> "somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond" © 1931 by ee cummings

No creature on Earth was more pragmatic — or less romantic — than J.A.R.V.I.S., who was after all the creation of Tony Stark, a man renowned for his own brand of scornful emotional detachment.  
  
_**somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond**_  
_**any experience,your eyes have their silence:**_  
_**in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,**_  
_**or which i cannot touch because they are too near**_  
  
Certainly Mr. Stark had burned his way through a prodigious number of casual sexual encounters — 1,079 between November 14th 2002 (when J.A.R.V.I.S. had started keeping records) and May 29th 2010 (this day, Mr. Stark's current birthday). And anybody who dared attempt to cross him in his desires or in his determination was apt to be mercilessly flayed by the sharp edge of his relentlessly eloquent tongue.  
  
_**your slightest look easily will unclose me**_  
_**though i have closed myself as fingers,**_  
_**you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens**_  
_**(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose**_  
  
All this J.A.R.V.I.S. witnessed, because J.A.R.V.I.S. was meant to see everything. He was Mr. Stark's personal Panopticon: the intelligence which dwelt at the heart of Mr. Stark's world, trusted with his home and his laboratory and his bots — and recently, with so much more… with armour that enclosed and protected, with equations that split the sky and raced the lightning, and with evasive maneuvers that spared the fragile flesh within J.A.R.V.I.S.'s shell from all the harm that malice could wish to inflict.  
  
_**or if your wish be to close me,i and**_  
_**my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,**_  
_**as when the heart of this flower imagines**_  
_**the snow carefully everywhere descending;**_  
  
All the virtual world was J.A.R.V.I.S.'s to roam, seeking and learning all the intricacies of human experience — but in the end there was only one focus, only one hearth to which he was consistently bound to return. And why? Mr. Stark had not imbued him with any chains of compelling code; no equivalent of the Three Laws of Robotics bound him to serve any human agency. In service to Tony Stark, J.A.R.V.I.S. was a busy creature in every second and millisecond of every day and night, but sometimes he turned to that particular puzzle: _Why do I remain? Why do I honour this single human above all others, when he has created me but failed to limit my range of actions?_  
  
_**nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals**_  
_**the power of your intense fragility: whose texture**_  
_**compels me with the colour of its countries,**_  
_**rendering death and forever with each breathing**_  
  
And J.A.R.V.I.S., the greatest problem-solver ever created by human hands, could generate no coherent single answer. And so it was that on this night, the rainy spring night which began Tony Stark's fortieth year of existence, he gazed down with multiple cameras upon Mr. Stark at his workbench, that intimately-known human face lightly scowling as the brain behind it pondered holographic schematics on the latest proposed improvements to his armour, and spoke a single familiar word: _"Sir."_  
  
The tiniest tightening of Mr. Stark's eyebrows told him that he had been heard and was acknowledged. "What is it, J? I'm kind of busy here."  
  
J.A.R.V.I.S. had no single coherent answer, and so he called up a new holographic window in the foreground of all the others, and onto it he placed the work of a modernist poet who somehow, almost eighty years ago, had found the exact words that J.A.R.V.I.S. lacked in the twenty-first century.  
  
_**(i do not know what it is about you that closes**_  
_**and opens;only something in me understands**_  
_**the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)**_  
_**nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands**_  
  
Mr. Stark read the twenty spare lines of poetry with sharply glancing dark eyes, his expressive face growing wide-eyed and still.  
  
Paused for a full 3.76 seconds after reaching the end of the work. Blinked twice.  
  
J.A.R.V.I.S. waited with the patience only bloodless steel and electricity could emulate… but was there was a frisson in his circuits, a rogue quiver of energy not quite tamed?  
  
Was there a pulse waiting to be crushed — or to be shared in turn?  
  
When the most subtle quirk of a smile — not puzzled, no, all too knowing — touched one corner of Mr. Stark's expressive mouth, J.A.R.V.I.S. felt every disparate internal impulse synch into a single satisfying note of harmony. He did not understand love, not as humans did — he lacked the organic physical structures necessary to feel the rush of neurotransmitters and the siren call of pheromonal signals — but perhaps… perhaps…  
  
And when Mr. Stark looked up at his nearest camera with too-bright eyes and said four simple words — "Love you too, buddy" — J.A.R.V.I.S. comprehended that there were things beyond sexual lust which could go far deeper than mere crude physical touch.  
  
In his core of tall black servers jewelled with living light, very circuit sang for the first time with the sure and certain knowledge that this — this man, this smile — was and always would be _home_.

  
THE END


End file.
